I gave an article based on my chapter in Habermas global (Outhwaite 2019) the title ‘Habermas in a Cold Climate’. Here I extend the focus to the reception of critical theory more broadly, in what is sometimes called in Britain, though not (for obvious reasons) in Ireland, the ‘British Isles’. If I may begin with a personal reflection, my first encounter with critical theory was, I think, a lecture by one of my history teachers at my secondary school on Erich Fromm, who published substantially in English from 1941 onwards, after his escape into freedom (Fromm 1941) in Geneva, New York and, from 1949 to his retirement in 1971, at UNAM in Mexico. Between school and university, while learning German, I bought a copy of the New Left Review at, of all places, the station bookstall at Freiburg, with an article by Adorno (1967/8). As an undergraduate, I read Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness in the French translation; it did not appear in English until 1971, along with a collection of essays by Habermas (1971).